486 
WITH THE TURKS. 
Road to 
Larissa. 
Larissa. 
the debris of copy-books, &c., with which the floor was strewn, seemed 
to have been a school. The rooms were filled with an indescribable 
litter of broken furniture, rags of clothes and bedding, and altogether, 
with the pretty little garden in the courtyard full of roses and 
oleanders in bloom, but also littered with rubbish, it furnished rather 
a melancholy spectacle; the same description would apply to many of 
the towns and villages which we afterwards passed through; some of 
the houses had generally been burnt and the timber of others utilised 
Tor fire-wood owing to the scarcity of timber of any sort; this, no 
doubt, was necessary, indeed some newspaper correspondents told me 
that they had been compelled to help themselves in this way. 
At Tyrnavos outside the large barrack square were drawn up seven 
more captured guns of position, of the same description as those already 
seen on the pass, also two Krupp Maxim guns of about 200lbs. identical, 
I believe, with those with which the Turkish batteries were equipped; 
the breech-pieces and sights had in all cases been removed, but the 
guns appeared in other respects to be quite serviceable. 
The road from hence to Larissa and the fields on both sides of it 
were strewn with dead horses, broken carriages, &c. We noticed in 
particular a great number of regimental caps, perhaps thrown away by 
the Greeks in their haste to assume, as a head-dress, the more con¬ 
venient fez. In one place were several ammunition wagons, the shell 
and shell trays lying scattered round them. 
Crossing several somewhat rickety, wooden bridges over small 
streams or irrigated channels and, finally, the large stone bridge over 
the river Peneios, which we were told the Greeks had made an un¬ 
successful attempt to blow up, we reached Larissa. Before crossing 
this bridge we were able to see something of the fortifications of 
which much had been said in the newspapers. They appeared to con¬ 
sist of a chain of small redoubts connected, more or less, by shelter 
trenches and disposed on an arc fronting towards the north-east, the 
direction it would seem from which an attack was expected, and were 
all situated to the east of the road from the Meluna so far as could be 
seen. 
Outside the town our progress was delayed some time by our meeting 
with a brigade of infantry about 3000 strong with a battery of artillery, 
who were said to be marching to Trikkala. 
Entering the town, which was practically deserted by its inhabitants 
at that time, we were guided to the quarters of Saifullah Pasha, 1 an 
able and energetic officer who, at the commencement of the war, was 
serving on the Staff of Edhem Pasha, but was then temporarily ap¬ 
pointed Governor of Larissa. Here what we at first supposed to be a 
formal visit developed into a most convivial dinner-party, which did 
not break up till very late in the evening, and it was with great 
difficulty that we succeeded in rousing our dragomans, who had 
established themselves for the night in the house allotted to us and 
’ Turkish Military Attache at Athens before the war, his knowledge of the mountains of Thessaly 
aequired during sporting expeditions is said to have been of great value. 
